God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great by Christian Cameron

mare Medea for a reason – she was all love one minute and death on hooves the next, and she was in a mood. She made heavier work of climbing the ridges than Poseidon had done, and I had to spend more time dismounted, leading her. But before the sun was down a finger’s breadth, I was across the stream and marsh where I’d first left Polystratus, into new territory.
    Medea was a noisier horse, too, and she gave a sharp whinny as I crested the second ridge. I put a hand on her neck, but she raised her head and let go a trumpet call, and I heard a horse answer.
    I drew my new sword. There were several horses, all coming up the ridge at me. Running for camp was out of the question – we were drilled relentlessly about becoming the means by which an enemy might discover the camp, when we were scouting. In fact, we might have been training for this moment all our lives.
    I tucked Medea in behind a stunted, bushy spruce and threw my chlamys over her head to shut her up. I could hear my own panicked breathing, and I assumed that every Illyrian in the woods could hear me, too.
    I’d picked a poor hiding place, though. Always pick a place of ambush from which you can see. If you can’t see the enemy, chances are he can’t see you – but you can panic too, while you don’t know whether he’s outflanking you or wandering into your trap. I crouched there on Medea’s back, a hand well out over her head, keeping my cloak in place so she’d be quiet, and I had no idea where in Tartarus the Illyrians were.
    But to move now – they had to be a few horse-lengths away.
    The next few heartbeats were the longest of the day. And then the gods took a hand, and nothing was as I expected.
    I waited. I could hear them moving, and I could hear them talking. They were quiet and careful and they knew that they were being watched. And I became aware that they’d sent men around the other side of my spruce thicket – so I was a dead man.
    Best to charge, I decided. For the record, this is a form of fear that probably kills more men than running from an enemy. The need to get it over with is absurd.
    I pulled my cloak off Medea’s head and got her under me, and we were at them.
    Fighting on horseback is very different to fighting on foot, mostly because you are not on your own feet, but on someone else’s. It’s hard to wrong-foot a man in a fight – at least, in the open. But it’s not so hard to wrong-foot another man on horseback – if he’s got his spear on the wrong side of the horse, say. The first Illyrian had his spear in his right hand, held at mid-haft, slanted slightly down, and I burst from cover and he caught the spearhead in his pony’s neck strap.
    I missed my overhand stab, but my spearhead slammed sideways into his head and he toppled.
    Then Medea took a spear in the chest, and while I tried to slow her, another in the rump, and down we went. It was so fast I didn’t have time to hurt, but rolled free and got to my feet.
    Got my back against a big tree.
    The rest of the Illyrians were already relaxing – they’d thought it was a great ambush sprung on them, and now they were realising that they had one boy, not a Macedonian army.
    A pair of them kneed their horses around the spruce thicket, but the rest turned into me.
    I got my spear.
    A boy my own age laughed, pulled a bow from a long scabbard under his knee and strung it.
    So I threw the spear.
    It was something we practised every day – if I hadn’t been able to hit him at that distance, I’d have had marks on my back like a bad slave.
    That took the smiles off their faces. The boy with the bow died with a gurgle.
    I drew my sword.
    Let’s make this quick – they shot my horse, and then they beat me to the ground with spear staves. I don’t think I marked any of them. They were good. And thorough. They broke both my arms.
    They bound me to a sapling like a deer carcass, and I screamed. It hurt a great deal.
    Several of them spoke Greek, and the chieftain